Knock the Rust off in the summer

Last week my friend Mark Silverberg (Believing the Line) and I were bemoaning the difficulty of actually sitting down and writing poetry, and he suggested we collaborate, a thing of which I have very little experience and he has much. (See, for example The Antigonish Review #172,  which includes three poems co-written by Mark, and Sean Howard.)

            “Sure,” I said, “but how will we start, let alone go on?”

            Then I bethought myself of something George Elliot Clarke recommended at a workshop I took with him in 2007 – get A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, and practice using each term.

            So that’s what Mark and I are doing these days.

            I suggested we start with something straightforward, like syllogisms.  We borrow a line we’ve heard from someone else, and let that be our first statement. Then one of us comes up with the second statement, and the other finishes it with the conclusion.

           Silly me; none of this is going to be very straightforward.

           After producing two-and-a-half attempts Mark mentioned in an email (we’re doing all this electronically): “I'm not sure if we're actually doing syllogisms, but I suppose we're doing something”. He’s not wrong. I’m pretty sure what we’re producing aren’t exactly syllogisms, because, well…

      Syllogisms treat language as reductively logical: A equals B.

      Language is metaphorical in poetry: B is more than A in C.

      Therefore, straight-up syllogisms are rarely poetry: A is a limited subset of C.

            So far, the process has been eye-opening, and the results unexpected.  (I’m not posting any examples  because we might want to publish some of them sometime, and putting stuff on the internet qualifies as a “previous publication” as far as most periodicals are concerned. Also, it’s early days yet; they’re first drafts, not finished poems. Also, too, we might need to get permission to use the borrowed lines.)